Owners of home photovoltaic systems will soon be able to make their households even more sustainable, because PV power is also suitable for charging personal electronic vehicles. A home energy management system created by ...

Hybrid electric vehicles, cell phones, digital cameras, and the Mars Curiosity rover are just a few of the many devices that use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Now a team of Penn State researchers has a simple mathematical ...

Following the Transatlantic Economic Council's decision to promote electric vehicles and smart grid interoperability, on 29 October the European Commission inaugurated a dedicated state-of-the-art laboratory, operated by ...

The pollution-cheating scandal that has engulfed auto giant Volkswagen is turning up the heat on the German government to make more determined headway in its self-declared "electromobility" goals, analysts say.

Corporate and government leaders gathered Thursday in Los Angeles to announce that hundreds more electric vehicles will be coming to California roads—and they'll have hundreds more places to charge up.

Under which conditions are electric vehicles less expensive than diesel vehicles? What are the positive environmental effects? And what about their acceptance by users and reliability in practice? The RheinMobil project coordinated ...

The launch of Tesla's long-awaited Model X electric car has received the sort of adulation that we've come to expect of new products from Apple. The Model X is a SUV with gull-wing doors – as made famous by the DeLorean ...

Wireless power transfer has many promising applications, such as contactless powering, electric vehicles, and energy harvesting. To construct a wireless power-transfer system, a "wireless transfer coupler" is necessary to ...

Electric vehicle

An electric vehicle (EV), also referred to as an electric drive vehicle, is a vehicle which uses one or more electric motors for propulsion. Depending on the type of vehicle, motion may be provided by wheels or propellers driven by rotary motors, or in the case of tracked vehicles, by linear motors. Electric vehicles can include electric cars, electric trains, electric airplanes, electric boats, electric motorcycles and scooters, and electric spacecraft.

Electric vehicles first came into existence in the mid-19th century, when electricity was among the preferred methods for automobile propulsion, providing a level of comfort and ease of operation that could not be achieved by the gasoline cars of the time. At one time the internal combustion engine (ICE) had completely replaced the electric drive as a propulsion method for automobiles, but electric power has remained commonplace in other vehicle types, such as trains and smaller vehicles of all types.

Electric vehicles are distinct from fossil fuel-powered vehicles in that they can receive their power from a number of sources, including fossil fuels themselves, nuclear power, and renewable sources such as tidal power, solar power, and wind power. This energy is then transmitted to the vehicle through use of overhead lines, wireless energy transfer, or a direct connection through an electrical cable. The electricity may then be stored onboard the vehicle using a battery, flywheel, supercapacitor, or fuel cell. Vehicles making use of engines working on the principle of combustion can usually only derive their energy from a single or a few sources, usually non-renewable fossil fuels.

At the beginning of the 21st century, increased concern over the environmental impact of the petroleum-based transportation infrastructure, along with the spectre of peak oil, led to renewed interest in an electric transportation infrastructure. As such, vehicles which can potentially be powered by renewable energy sources, such as hybrid electric vehicles or pure electric vehicles, are becoming more popular.